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Thursday, May 28, 2015

Harvest of Rage

In the spring of 1996, the peace of Oklahoma City was shattered when a truck bomb ignited outside a federal office. Nearly two hundred people were killed, and nigh a thousand injured, in one man's act of rage against the government. But in Harvest of Rage, Joel Dyer writes that McVeigh was far from alone: he was part of a movement of thousands, spread across the country but concentrated in its withering agricultural heartland. The farm crisis -- the growing poverty and destruction of rural life in the wake of globalization -- has created legion of homegrown terrorists, whose despair has been crafted into insurrection against the government. Dyer spent seven years interviewing and visiting anti-government types attempting to get to the bottom of rural militancy, and offers sections on the movement's ideological bases as well as his economic argument. Although portions of this are badly dated, especially given that Dyer sees Endtimes-paranoia about the coming of the Millennium as a factor, the central issues are alive and well twenty years later.

Dyer is not sympathetic to most of the ideas that he encounters during his seven-year investigation (he refers to the free enterprise system as one "in which the government does nothing to help people"), but he does empathize with the plight of his subjects, sharing some of their concerns if not their response. The central issue, as Dyer sees it, is economic: as globalization allows for American firms to manufacture goods and purchase food more cheaply overseas, America's own primary industries are being gutted. Family farms are being eaten alive by monstrously large international entities like Cargill, and as they fail they take with them rural towns. Further , Dyer writes, a farm is different from other small businesses; a farmer is more likely to have inherited the estate from his father, who inherited from his own. The farm is home, and can contain within it an family's entire history. To be responsible for losing that heritage can be emotionally crippling: little wonder when this ruin looms, some farmers clutch at whatever desperate straws they can find.

Having
established the nature of the farm crisis as one not causing a shortage of
food, but one obliterating the livelihoods of families and local economies of
families throughout the west, Dyer then argues that their legitimate grievances
are being twisted into sometimes violent conspiracy theories. Farmers are not simply competing with
multinationals;in fact, they depend on
them for storage, equipment, and some supplies.Some chicken farmers are functional sharecroppers, doomed to contracts
withgiants like Tyson which constantly
demand equipment upgrades that keep them in debt.The law is no recourse; not only are the
oversight agencies tasked with keeping monopolies in check staffed by former
members of the very companies they are policing, but the government bears
responsibility in promoting “get big or get out” policies. Many of the families
interviewed within were crippled by the farm policies of the 1970s and the
monkeying-around with of interest rates.On realizing how many of their woes came from monopolies, and their
sinister connection with the government which was supposed to be fair
referee,the door was pried open for
conspiracy.Government policy was not
simply inappropriate, or corrupt: it became viewed as evil. Here was a plot to destroy individual freeholders and replace
them by massive conglomerates controlled by a few,in one measure strengthening the cabal and
undermining economic resistance. It was a sign of the times, the advent of a
New World Order.The architect of this
scheme was not a pocket-lining bureaucrat, but Satan himself.Obviously,it was the duty of every true Christian to resist – little wonder the
government was so interested intaking
the weapons ofAmericans! From there
follows militia movements, composed of individuals willing to shoulder arms in
defense of their rights – against the tyranny of the state, if need be.

All of this
is tremendously interesting, although the central argument tends to wander away
from its roots. Dyer’s goal is to link the farm crisis with rising
antigovernment rhetoric and violence, but after some sections on farmers
attempting to defraud lenders through legalese, he examines various parts of
the antigovernment as a whole, not all of them with any rural dependence.Religious obsession with the rise of the New
World Order and doomsday, for instance, was common in the sect of Christianity
I was raised in, but we haven’t been farmers for three generations. The same is true of the book’s sections on strict
Constitutionalism and monetary policy: one need not be a distressed farmer to
hold the government in contempt for granting itself war powers in peacetime, or
for entrusting the nation’s financial security to an entity that has control
over the money supply, but no accountability whatsoever.Dyer
has a tendency to make sweeping statements – at one time, he urges the reader
to go into any small rural town and take note of the abundance of people with
Constitutions in their front pockets.99.9999% of the time, he says, these people are involved to some degree
in the antigovernment movement. Well, who isn’t
involved in antigovernment activity to some degree?He also assumes that all of the pipe bombs
discovered in the United States in a given year were deployed by agents of the
vast rural agenda. Dyer is genuine,
though, both in his concern about how the heartland is being devestation, and
in his fear of what is to come.No war
of disaffected farmers ever broke out, however, despite the coming ofthe Millennium, and I for one think Dyer’s extensive
time embedded in some fairly radical groups gave him his own acute sense
ofparanoia.

Harvest’s argument
is stretched too thin sometimes to be credible, but the facts and stories Dyer
turns up are worth the read alone. The
issues at hand are still relevant: many of the grievances aired here drive the
contemporary Tea Party movement, for instance.Even with its tares, Harvest of
Rage is a commendable look insideAmerican
populism and how it can turn tragically violent.